The Museum
of Work & Culture is about local culture, immigration, labor,
and enterprise in the Blackstone Valley, the birthplace of the American
Industrial Revolution. The story unfolds on the self-guided tour through
films, interactive
audio presentations, please-touch exhibits, displays including over
200 photographs, and changing exhibits.
Students enter the Museum
across the threshold of a Québécois farmhouse to encounter a typical
habitantâs life and family in the pre-industrial era. From there,
they begin a journey through the workaday world of Woonsocketâs residents
and immigrant arrivals. Walking onto the shop floor of a textile mill,
from the front porch of a triple-decker apartment house, sitting in
church, at a school desk, and in the labor union hall, students find
themselves immersed in the everyday lives of the working-class in
New England from before the First World War to the present.